


binary suns

by Kierkegarden



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Canon compliant with slight adjustments, Freeform, I could get diagnostic here but I'll refrain, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Obi-Wan Kenobi Character Study, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a Mess, Poeticism without Plot, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-30
Updated: 2018-01-30
Packaged: 2019-03-11 11:36:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13523430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kierkegarden/pseuds/Kierkegarden
Summary: Ben realizes in his age that midichlorians are as toxic as affide crystal or manax root or too much fire water. It doesn’t matter which side of the Force you use, it sits in your blood like a toxin and it will surely, surely kill you.It killed Anakin.





	binary suns

**Author's Note:**

> It's 3am, I can't sleep, I'm having intense feelings about the 'from a certain point of view' one-off that I never before considered from *this* point of view, I'm addicted to the unreliable narrator trope and writing Obi-Wan moping around on Tatooine is what I do best.

The worn photograph is a relic from another age, a busier age when his life had pulsed with purpose. Ben rubs his thumb, rough and calloused, over the sharp red beard his younger self wore so well. It circles over his head and he can hear the low hum of _The Resolute_ in motion, can feel the scratchy blanket he shared with Anakin in the low light when he wasn’t sure - _he knew it somehow_ \- they would fight together another day. _Anakin._ The musky scent of that sharp green shampoo and sun-kissed skin.

His thumb travels across the frame as if to tie them together, bring him home by some ancient magic. Anakin’s head is tilted back in a confident grin - caught mid-laughter - unstoppable in its inertia. The Force breaths between order and entropy, through the past and the future, through the waves of Anakin’s hair and his own expression, secure to be in Anakin’s orbit. He had been so proud - _was he still?_ \- to be Anakin’s best friend, to be the one Anakin called for and counted on, his confidant, his Anakin, _his._

 

Words mean nothing, Ben knows, as someone who often sees more than words, and yet words mean everything. Once upon a time, words were his choice of weapon. Promises and flattery, symbols of good faith. Ben knows that words lie, words that codify the correct procedure are rarely more than ray shields, compromised by things that come more naturally like sleeping, eating, soft embraces and the scratchy blankets against his thigh. He finds himself, these days, clamped under the weight of these binary suns, himself and his younger self, transfixed by nostalgia.

True betrayal sits like a lump at the bottom of his stomach. True betrayal wants no revenge, it waits to be corrected as he searches his mind, like feeding through code, for where he went wrong. True betrayal doesn’t burn, it seeps, it drowns, it punishes. It dances on the sun-dappled hair of the child when Owen says “he looks like his father -” and Ben can’t will himself to see it.

“No,” he jokes, “He’s crawling in the sand,” and Owen looks at him blankly.

“Anakin didn’t like sand.” As if it’s a fact that every school child learns.

“Oh.”

 

“Who are they?” Luke asks - ten year olds rarely have time for tact - when Ben has him over for supper. He draws the kettle of tea to cool by the window. The pictures on the sill are sun-faded, framing the house, lower than eyesight. Betrayal looks like a desert, it looks like nothingness. It looks like Ben being more angry that his beard is bleached a shade too light from exposure than angry at Anakin, who could never not be perfect.

“That was the 501st Battalion.”

Luke looks at him with slight curiosity.

“The one up front is me, and beside is my brother at arms. Behind us, the troopers who were under his command.”

“From the war?”

“From the war.”

Ben doesn’t talk about the war.

 

(Mornings on _The Resolute_ come easily. It’s easy to slip out of Anakin’s bed and towards the bustling command center, it’s easy to blend in as if it was nothing, to hold with him the pride of being _chosen_ by the chosen one behind shields all day, through holos and through missions. It’s easy to be a happy hypocrite. He tells himself again that it’s purely physical, but everyone with half a brain knows it’s not. It’s too easy to break the Code, he remembers thinking. If outsiders could breech them this way, the Separatists would have already won.)

 

It’s easy to go back there, though his body aches and his hands look so old, framing their smiling faces. It’s easy and it’s not.

It’s easier to take this point of view. It’s easier to enshrine himself in memories. It’s easier to call them brothers and mourn him like he’s dead. But it’s not easy, Ben thinks, nothing about it is easy.

 

Mornings on Tatooine come slowly. Ben feels his teeth aging in his gums as he chews and chews on a piece of bantha jerky. He feels his heart age  - and harden as he reads the holojournal: reforms, restrictions and protocols. He wishes, somehow, that he could face that monster who killed Anakin, feel the dark side of the Force rush through him as he only did once before - towards the monster that killed his own Master.

It felt alarmingly good.

Ben realizes in his age that midichlorians are as toxic as affide crystal or manax root or too much fire water. It doesn’t matter which side of the Force you use, it sits in your blood like a toxin and it will surely, _surely_ kill you.

It killed Anakin.

 _No, better,_ Obi-Wan forges, he crafts, he grapples for a truth that isn’t so messy.

_Vader killed Anakin._

Anakin who loved too hard, Anakin who made sure he was eating enough, whose fingertips loosened around Ahsoka and fell into Obi-Wan’s hand as equals, Anakin who tried, Anakin who learned.

 

Memories flood Ben Kenobi’s dreams in reverse.

Ben drinks fire water.

Ben forgets.

 

Luke is nineteen now and Ben can no longer deny that he looks like Anakin.

 

“My father didn’t fight in the Clone Wars. He was a navigator on a spice freighter.”

Ben feels his insides fall to pieces as he breathes out frustration, as Jedi often do. The boy deserves to know the truth, the great man his father had been. History deserves to know the truth.

 

(“It’s going to be alright,” Obi-Wan had said, the first time he had felt a disturbance at Anakin’s bedside and he had come running. His padawan had been screaming, moaning about the slavers prodding him with hot metal rods.

“Ssh,” Obi-Wan was so young then, hair still growing out of it’s padawan cut, unsure of what to say, “You’re safe now.”)

 

Ben sighs. “That's what your uncle told you. He didn't hold with your father's ideals; he felt he should've stayed here and not gotten involved.”

Luke’s face flashes with betrayal: the quick, angry kind.

“He fought with you in the Clone Wars?”

  
(Ben remembers the first time he had called Ahsoka “our padawan” - how it had accidentally slipped out. They were equals then, although he knew that Anakin would rocket past him, his raw strength with the Force staggering to contain itself in such a young and inexperienced person. _I only hope I’ve done him justice,_ Obi-Wan had thought, _I only hope I’ve given him everything I had to give._ )

 

“Yes. I was once a Jedi knight, the same as your father,” Obi-Wan explains, removing the faded picture once again from the window sill, “This was him, right there next to me with the wavy brown hair and terribly impetuous grin.”

“His hair looks blond,” Luke blathers in his daze.

“That’s just the sun damage, although his hair did sometimes shine golden in the light.”

Luke’s fingertips run across the picture longingly. “I wish I had known him.”

 

(Obi-Wan Kenobi had not internalized what he’d done. His eyes had darted across the bunk, the metal railing glinting dimly, Anakin - soft, naked and breathing steadily. _It’s just a physical need,_ Obi-Wan had thought, _Everyone has needs._ Anakin started in his sleep, rolling to embrace his Master. He turned to make room, letting the boy’s limbs drape lazily around him, possessing him, refocusing him. Disturbed, Obi-Wan had clung to the shadows towards his own bunk. His heart raced as he lay in what seemed like a different gravitational pull.)

 

Ben beams proudly; smiles sadly. “He was the best star pilot in the galaxy, and a cunning warrior. I understand that you've become quite a good pilot yourself.”

Luke nods.

_And he was my apprentice_

_And he was my best friend._

_And he was my brother._

The line is so tired that Ben skips it entirely.

 

It becomes a mantra like the Jedi Code or the names of everyone he lost. The sort of thing Ben says in his head while doing anything mundane and alone. He towels the bantha meat in its marinade and restates: _Darth Vader betrayed Anakin Skywalker and killed him in cold blood._

Vader and Anakin. They are binary suns, like Ben and Obi-Wan, like despair and faith, like the Sith and the Jedi, possession and compassion, like the dark side and the light.

 

_And I loved him._

The line is as scratchy as Anakin’s blanket on his thigh and words - Ben thinks - words are messiest when they tell the truth.


End file.
